It turns out that the Twitter hivemind might be good for something, after all: Predicting Oscar winners.
Tweet monitoring service TweetBeat has collected and analyzed the every Oscar-related Twitter post since the nominees were announced last month. Through this, TweetBeat has concluded that The King’s Speech will win Best Picture at this year’s Academy Awards, reports CNet.
While The King’s Speech blew the competition out of the water with 31.4 percent of the 25,000 “votes” cast by Twitter users, The Social Network received 13.7 percent, Black Swan came in third with 10.9 percent, followed closely by Inception with 10.6 percent and True Grit with 8.1 percent. All other Best Picture nominees walked away with less than 8 percent of the vote.
Best Picture wasn’t the only category analyzed, of course. In the Best Actress group, Black Swan star Natalie Portman cleanly took the top spot with a whopping 54.5 percent of votes. Runners-up in that category include Nicole Kidman, who received 16.7 percent; Annett Benning, with 11 percent; Jennifer Lawrence at 10.6 percent and Michelle Williams in last place at 7.3 percent.
Colin Firth, star of The King’s Speech, easily won on the men’s side with 56.4 percent. The Social Network star Jesse Eisenberg took 14.1 percent to come in second, and 127 Days lead James Franco came in third with 12.3 percent.
Of course, it’s impossible to know how accurate these predictions are until the awards are announced this Sunday, February 27. But the results might surprise you.
TweetBeat isn’t the first to think to harness the prediction skills of the collective Twitterverse. Last year, researchers at Indiana University-Bloomington concluded that tweet analysis could be used to accurately predict the ups and downs of the stock market up to three days in advance. In that study, Twitter was correct 86.7 percent of the time. So it sounds like Colin Firth and co. should start fine-tuning their acceptance speeches ASAP.
